Toy Maker wrote:It's pretty far outside your budget, but you might want to take a look at one of these anyway...One of those things where after you hear them, the price won't matter to you much anymore !!!Try to find a local shop that has one, go take a drive, and play for the day!You WON'T be sorry !! They are worth saving your pennies a few more months for, I promise !

Whatever you do make sure you buy two subs, I made the mistake of just buying one ULD18 from Velodyne and I should d have got 2 - 12” or 2 - 15”. They say you only need one in the low frequency but the minute I put it in the system I could tell a difference. My main speakers would go almost as low as the Velodyne (snell type B’s) but I sometimes drove them to hard and would rattle the woofers. I ended up taking the sub out and just not turning it up as loud.

Toy Maker... Yeah he would love to be able to get ahold of one of those bad boys but they are definatly a little more then we can swing. Ive run a bunch of JL car subs and always liked em. As I understand it that is the same driver as the car audio JL 13 W7?!?!

Toy Maker wrote:From what they tell me it's not a W7... something different, but close to it.

The W7 in car audio form is slightly smaller than the driver used in the home subs. The Fathom/Gotham driver is a hybrid that is tweaked & has about a 4" ( ) excursion. From their website:

You won't find an off-the-shelf woofer in any JL Audio home subwoofer because designing and building superior subwoofer drivers lies at the core of our passion for audio.

For the last decade, JL Audio has been at the forefront of research into fundamental loudspeaker behavior. The company has developed proprietary electromagnetic and suspension analysis systems and invested heavily in state-of-the-art testing and manufacturing systems. JL Audio's intense focus on research has borne subwoofer driver designs widely considered as reference standards for linear displacement and dynamic stability. It has also resulted in numerous U.S. and International Patents issued for technologies that refine and extend the performance envelope of the dynamic driver.

JL Audio's experience with long excursion woofers is a perfect foil to the intense low frequency demands of home theater program material. The drivers used in Gotham® and Fathom® offer a performance envelope so vast, that we can deliver exceptional output without resorting to aggressive electronic limiting or compression.

Driver Technologies:DMA-Optimized Motor System

DMA is JL Audio's proprietary Dynamic Motor Analysis system aimed at improving dynamic motor behavior. As a result of DMA optimization, our loudspeaker's motor systems remain linear in force over an extreme range of excursion while maintaining a highly stable fixed magnetic field over a wide power range. This leads to vastly reduced distortion and accurate transient performance... or put simply: tight, clean, articulate bass.

OverRoll Surround (U.S. Patent #5,687,247 and #5,949,898)

The OverRoll surround spans over the driver's mounting flange, utilizing available diameter wasted in conventional speakers. This allows the use of the wider roll necessary to control high-excursions without sacrificing precious cone area.

W-Cone(U.S. Patent #6,496,590) The W-Cone is a unit-body cone assembly that delivers astonishing cone stiffness with minimal mass. The shape also provides incredible torsional rigidity, which is critical to maintaining voice coil alignment at the suspension limits.

Elevated Frame Cooling Technology (U.S. Patent #6,219,431 and #6,229,902)This feature delivers cool air through slots directly above the top-plate to the voice coil of the speaker. This not only enhances power handling, but also sound quality by minimizing dynamic parameter shifts and power compression.

I couldn't afford the JLs, so I decided to go with Velodyne, which is a very respectable sub manufacturer. All they do is subs and they're very good at it. I own one and they do sound very nice.

Of course, Sunfire subs are fantastic as well, but it's hard to get them for a reasonable price in Canada. Cheapest I found was around $1200 (for a used TS-EQ12). For that price, I pay a few hundred more and buy a JL Audio F113.